Thomas Aquinas — "The act of generation is natural to man."
The act of generation is natural to man.
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More from Thomas Aquinas
"A slave is an instrument of his master, and is his property."
"If a man commits the sin of sodomy, he is to be put to death."
"Heretics can not only be excommunicated, but also justly killed."
"The purpose of marriage is the procreation of children."
"It is not lawful for a man to have more than one wife at a time."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Procreation — having children — is a built-in feature of human nature, not a cultural invention or arbitrary obligation. Aquinas is saying that reproducing is something humans are naturally oriented toward, part of what we are as a species. This is not merely biological observation; it is a philosophical claim that generation fits the proper ends of human life, making it morally significant and entirely legitimate.
Relevance to Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas built his entire moral framework on natural law — God embedded proper ends into human nature, and acting in accord with those ends is virtuous. Though celibate himself as a Dominican friar, he argued marriage and procreation were sacramental goods. This quote reflects his Aristotelian-Christian synthesis: reproduction fulfills a natural teleological purpose, morally legitimate and, within marriage, spiritually sanctioned by divine order.
The era
In 13th-century Europe, the Church was consolidating marriage as a formal sacrament, declared at Lateran IV in 1215, while debates raged over sexuality's morality. Heretical movements like Catharism condemned reproduction as evil, trapping souls in corrupt flesh. Aquinas wrote partly to counter such views, affirming bodily life as good. Scholastic theology was reconciling Aristotle's biology with Christian doctrine, making natural-order arguments the dominant intellectual framework of the era.
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